Tricking Notepad

Tricking Notepad


Here's a really funny way to break Notepad.

This actually works. It will not crash your computer, it just breaks Notepad in that it causes it to display very oddly. No permnent damage comes of the following steps.

1. Open up Notepad (not Wordpad, not Word or any other word processor)
2. Type in this sentence exactly (without quotes): "this app can break"
3. Save the file to your hard drive.
4. Close Notepad
5. Open the saved file by double clicking it.



Instead of seeing your sentence, you should see a series of squares. For whatever reason, Notepad can't figure out what to do with that series of characters and breaks

Explanation: In notepad, any other 4-3-3-5 letter word combo will have the same results.
It is all to do with a limitation in Windows. Text files containing Unicode UTF-16-encoded Unicode are supposed to start with a "Byte-Order Mark" (BOM), which is a two-byte flag that tells a reader how the following UTF-16 data is encoded.

The reason this happens:

1) You are saving to 8-bit Extended ASCII (Look at the Save As / Encoding format)

2) You are reading from 16-bit UNICODE (You guessed it, look at the Save As / Encoding format)

This is why the 18 8-bit characters are being displayed as 9 (obviously not supported by your codepage) 16-bit UNICODE


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